RIP shuttle – let's get back to real space exploration

Time to ditch the black armbands and look beyond low Earth orbit again. The shuttle's passing marks the start of an exciting new era

AND then there were none. A profound feeling of emptiness struck many space aficionados in the US and beyond last month after Atlantis touched down for the last time, the 133rd and final return of a space shuttle orbiter.

It's the end of space flight, the end of NASA, the end of space exploration... the lament was widespread, from Twitter to the mainstream press, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, it is bewildering that there will be no "next shuttle launch date" as there has been for most of the past 30 years, but let's admit it, the loss now felt is more a visceral reaction than a rational assessment of where the space programme of the US and the rest of the world actually stands - and where it's headed.

In fact, little that the $200 billion shuttle programme accomplished had a direct bearing on space exploration. The orbiters went round and round in low Earth orbit (LEO), technically in the upper atmosphere, mainly delivering 230 tonnes of deployed satellites and the same mass in parts for the International Space Station while giving 347 astronauts a ride.

But they did so at a cost literally orders of magnitude beyond what was promised 40 years ago. For decades their consistently high budget prevented any serious progress in spaceflight beyond LEO where, as practically everyone agrees, exploration in its true sense begins.

Humankind's brief venture to the moon just before the shuttle era has morphed into an almost mythical story, and feeble attempts to revive the old boldness in 1989 and 2004, by US presidents George Bush senior and his son, quickly fell victim to fiscal realities.

In spite of the budgetary black holes of the shuttle and the later space-station programme, another kind of space exploration existed in its shadow. All five classical planets, from Mercury to Saturn, have had, have or will soon have robotic satellites not just flying by, but remaining in orbit around them, and successful landings have been performed repeatedly on Venus and Mars.

Currently only Jupiter is without an orbiter, but this will change in 2016 when NASA's Juno mission, launched this month in the post-shuttle malaise, arrives at its destination, equipped to look deeper into the gas giant's interior than ever before.

In September two GRAIL lunar orbiters will launch, and in November the most sophisticated of all Mars rovers, Curiosity, will blast off. And even while the final shuttle was still in space, the first orbiter arrived between Mars and Jupiter at a big asteroid called Vesta; the Dawn spacecraft has already turned it into a little world of wonder and will move on next year to Ceres, making it the first dwarf planet to be orbited.

Are these any lesser space adventures than crewed flights in LEO? Robots they may be, but it is human curiosity alone that pushes these probes to the corners of the solar system and vastly extends our horizons.

What's more, no longer do you have to wait for an age to see the bewitching vistas these space probes send home. With the web as the backbone and social media as the carrier, these images now reach millions as close to real time as the policy of a mission permits.

And some missions do open a firehose of raw imagery, eagerly ingested by a highly committed fandom of image-processing specialists who turn the bits into marvellous products, often better and faster than the actual mission team is able to.

The daily image downloads from the Mars rover Opportunity - yes, it's still driving around the Red Planet after more than seven years - and the Saturn orbiter Cassini have been so warmly welcomed that missions with less open policies, such as NASA's current Mercury and Vesta orbiters, let alone the European Space Agency's Venus and Mars orbiters, are often subject to harsh criticism.

Some old-school planetary scientists still fear that someone will abuse "their" data, but the Mars rover missions have demonstrated that sharing raw images is a win-win situation, as those who work with such images are also the best PR people a mission can wish for. British amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson, for example, has become the best source by far on Opportunity's progress.

The most visible symbol of this new way of doing things is the optical camera on the Juno mission: its contribution to science is seemingly nil; it flies solely for public entertainment.

So the robots will rule again for a decade or more. But what about the future of crewed flight? Few realise that the US has two crewed programmes on its books rather than one. There is the NASA-supported mini "space race" between private companies that want to offer cheap access to the space station in addition to the Russian ferry service. Then there's NASA's new focus on spaceships and huge rockets permitting human travel beyond the moon, with a visit to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s as the first big goal. Harsh political struggles on how best to move forward and escalating fiscal uncertainties aside, this plan enjoys substantial support and promises as much drama as the Apollo landings.

With constant progress in virtual-presence technology, driven in part by the gaming industry, this mission will come to living rooms around the world as none before.

So too will the follow-up, set to go all the way to Mars in the 2030s. Then it may well be the astronauts in the planet's orbit who run avatar-like robots on its surface and experience near-perfect telepresence with sub-second lag time, while Earth tunes in to the experience. The end of space exploration? Surely not.

Daniel Fischer is a space-science writer based in Königswinter, Germany. He is the author of Mission Jupiter: The spectacular journey of the Galileo spacecraft (Springer, 2001), which is now available in paperback

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